A Note on My Harding Research

The information I posted during 2020 mostly covered Warren Harding's front-porch campaign from his home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, Ohio. The campaign officially started on July 31, 1920, and ended on September 25. The plan was to post daily on events that occurred exactly 100 years ago that day, but I shared other information as well. You'll have to read bottom-to-top if you want to follow the campaign from Day 1.

I used the open web for some of my research but also information accessible by using my library card or my subscription to www.newspapers.com. The most useful resource was the Marion Star, which was owned by the Hardings at the time of the campaign. I also browsed online copies of other newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Star, and the Dayton Daily News, which, in 1920, was owned by Harding's Democratic opponent, Governor James M. Cox. I also posted information from other newspapers that covered Harding's trips away from Marion during the campaign.

Another great resource I used was Dale E. Cottrill's The Conciliator, a 1969 biography of the president that expanded an earlier bibliography of Harding's speeches. An online version is available at the Internet Archive, but I used a hard copy borrowed from the State Library of Ohio.

Readers should not construe anything posted here as a political statement on my part. I just like Harding as a historical topic.

9/24/2020

Friday, September 24, 1920

Twelve hundred visitors from West Virginia travel to Marion to hear Senator Harding:
Judge Vandervoort, Congressmen Woodyard, Fellow Americans: I am very happy over this pilgrimage. I have, as Judge Vandervoort has said, come a good many times into your wonderful state, not only as a matter of duty but as a matter of very keen pleasure. I have come into West Virginia not alone because you are neighbors of Ohio and think and aspire as we do in the Buckeye state, but because it is good to come among the live, aspiring, achieving population of your remarkable new state. I have come there to worship at the shrine of him who made the first great impassioned stroke for modern American freedom, I delight to come among you because there is a type of citizenship in the mountains of your wonderful state that has no counterpart in all America. And I tell you, my countrymen, if the day ever comes when the spirit of America, which God forbid, should ever fade although sometimes it would seem to do so — I say, if the day ever comes when the spirit of America should seem to fade, you could go in the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and still find the soul of the United States of America 
alive.

It has been my fortune in some twenty years of political life to do considerable campaign speaking, and I like to say it to you, I have never found any section of our glorious country so delightful and so inspiring to visit as in the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

This illustration is published on the front page of today's Columbus Republican in Indiana:


 Sources:

  • "Harding Flays Shipping Board." Marion Star. 24 September 1920. 

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